The #1 Killer of Engineering Efficiency

It’s broken communication. 

Bringing a hardware product to market takes an army of people, and underneath it all is a maze of decisions and handoffs. Hardware rarely fails from one big mistake. It bleeds out from wasted time. Tiny delays chasing clarifications quietly snowball into weeks of lost momentum.

In software, streamlined tools enable real-time collaboration and automated handoffs. In hardware, engineers are still buried in emails, spreadsheets, and scattered CAD files. As a result, manufacturing spends far too much time chasing drawings, specs, and fixes that should have been clear from the start.

Pedro Neves, Co-Founding Engineer at Exowatt, has seen how much time disappears in these gaps between teams:

“Historically, most non-design engineering time has gone into coordination, supplier follow-ups, and reconciling cross-functional input before work can progress.”

The handoff from engineering to manufacturing should be seamless. Instead, it’s the single biggest choke point in product development.

The hidden cost of a poorly orchestrated handoff

If engineering handoffs are sloppy, every downstream gain is wasted. Engineering efficiency is the multiplier. When engineering handoffs flow, quality climbs and delivery stabilizes.

As Pedro puts it:

“Efficiency is about ensuring work moves without constant interruptions, rework, or firefighting. When the process flows, quality improves, delivery becomes predictable, and the whole organization feels the lift.”

But today, engineers are still stuck retyping part numbers, double checking revisions, and retaking screenshots by hand. That’s not engineering — it’s administrative drag. The only way out is to equip teams with tools that lift the burden, modernize workflows, and free engineers to do what they do best: engineer.

Building a flow that works for you

Fixing process isn’t about squeezing more hours out of engineers — it’s about fixing communication. And in hardware, communication lives in documents.

Drawings, BOMs, specs, work instructions, purchase orders — they’re all different slices of the same story. But too often, each one tells a slightly different version. That’s where inefficiency is born.

If every document isn’t connected, teams waste hours reconciling what’s “real.” Misalignments in a tolerance or a part number might look small, but they ripple across departments, eroding trust, slowing production, and piling on cost.

Pedro says:

“If one recurring task could be automated, it would be the repetitive creation and entry of CAD data and part numbers.”

That’s because this data flows everywhere. If it’s not consistent across every document, the handoff between engineering and manufacturing collapses.

Modern, connected documentation fixes this. By pulling directly from engineering data, every document in the chain — BOMs, drawings, work instructions, test plans, work orders — tells the same story. One source of truth. One version of reality. No wasted clarifications.

How to catch up

The software world embraced this lesson a decade ago: protect engineers’ time, and the entire system benefits. Hardware is overdue.

Gearing up for production? Build your next set of docs (BOMs, work instructions, quality plans) in Quarter20 and watch how much faster, cleaner, and calmer your handoff becomes.